Ireland tops division two of four on donors’ aid transparency

Donors’ openness about their overseas aid spending, a vital building block for greater aid effectiveness, comes under scrutiny in the Aid Transparency Assessment 2010, just released. The assessment ranks donors in four groupings according to a combination of indicators gauging their stated commitment to aid transparency, their transparency to recipient governments and their transparency to civil society.

With a 70 percent score, Ireland tops the second tier of donors analysed, above the donor average (60.8%), having explicit commitment to aid transparency but remaining inconsistent across some areas of transparency, says Publish What You Fund, the global campaign for aid transparency.

Ireland generally does well, the report says, but is slightly below average on planning transparency and the availability of specific information (both general documents and country-specific documents, or gender disaggregated data, for example). Ireland scores especially well on the ‘commitment to transparency’ indicator for its full participation in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), reporting against ‘tied aid’ and having a Freedom of Information Act.

However, “its practice has still to catch up with its intentions”, the report states, and it scores closer to average on transparency to recipient country governments, planning transparency, and transparency to civil society.

Ireland (60%) also scores just above average (58.9%) on the Humanitarian Response Index ratings of the transparency of humanitarian donors.
For more information, go to: http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/

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